Katja Reuter
University of Southern California, USA
Title: Trial promoter: A web-based tool for boosting the promotion of clinical research through social media
Biography
Biography: Katja Reuter
Abstract
Participant recruitment into clinical trials represents a major barrier to clinical and translational research and is often associated with implementation delays and high costs. This hinders the translation of scientific discoveries into interventions that improve the health of individuals and the public across populations. Numerous barriers to clinical trial participant recruitment have been identified, including the lack of awareness among patients that trials are available. Several groups have demonstrated that social media such as Facebook and Twitter can be used to reach and enroll participants efficiently into clinical studies. To scale up the number of clinical trials that could potentially benefit from dissemination via SM, we developed and successfully tested trial promoter, a tool that automates the generation, distribution and assessment of clinical trial recruitment messages via social media. In order to test the tool and the correctness of the generated messages, clinical trials (n=46) were randomized into social media messages and distributed via the microblogging social media platform Twitter and the social network Facebook. The percent correct was calculated to determine the probability with which trial promoter generates accurate messages. During a 10-week testing phase, Trial Promoter automatically generated and published 525 social media messages on Twitter and Facebook. On average, trial promoter correctly used the message templates and substituted the message parameters (text, URLs, and disease hashtags) 97.7% of the time (1563/1600). Trial promoter may serve as a promising tool to render clinical trial promotion more efficient while requiring limited resources.